In this week’s episode of the SLP Now Podcast, Marisha shares five practical, evidence-backed strategies to help students learn, practice, and generalize compound sentences. She also shares strategies to help make it easier for students to understand those abstract conjunctions!
👉 Prefer to listen? Check out the full podcast episode above for a quick blitz through all five strategies.
1️⃣ Start with clear visuals.
Give students an intro visual that defines a compound sentence and shows the FANBOYS conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so).
Then, build on that with:
– A “recipe card” showing sentence + comma + conjunction + sentence
– Symbol cards for conjunction meanings
These concrete visuals help students internalize the function of conjunctions, not just the form.
Visual and multimodal supports strengthen students’ metalinguistic awareness and retention (Cook, Mitchell, & Goldin-Meadow, 2008).
Click here to download the visuals for compound sentences.
2️⃣ Teach sentence combining explicitly.
Give students two short sentences and model joining them with a target conjunction.
Cued combining: Provide the sentences and the conjunction.
Open combining: Remove supports as students gain independence.
Sentence-combining instruction reliably improves syntactic maturity and writing quality when scaffolded and faded over time (Strong, 1986).
3️⃣ Use sentence expansion and reduction.
Encourage flexibility by asking students to expand simple sentences into compound ones or reduce compound sentences into shorter forms.
This back-and-forth manipulation builds syntactic control and comprehension.
Alternating expansion and reduction helps students generalize grammar goals across tasks (Fey et al., 1997).
4️⃣ Add movement for meaning.
Make conjunctions physical!
Assign one student per clause and another as the conjunction.
The “conjunction student” can hold or act out the joining symbol (like a plus sign for and).
Movement helps learners encode meaning through multiple modalities.
Gesture and embodied practice make abstract grammar concepts more memorable (Cook et al., 2008).
5️⃣ Plan for generalization.
Don’t let the skill stay in the speech room!
Collaborate with classroom teachers so students can:
– Use mini visual reminders at their desks
– Identify compound sentences in reading passages
– Apply conjunctions in writing assignments
Integrated service delivery—where SLPs and teachers align targets—leads to stronger transfer of language skills (Cirrin et al., 2010).
Why This Matters
Understanding compound sentences helps students:
– Combine ideas clearly
– Improve written cohesion
– Build complex syntax essential for reading comprehension (Scott & Balthazar, 2013)
And when students see and act out those conjunctions, abstract language becomes tangible.
Free Resource
Click here to download the Compound Sentences skill pack!
References
Cirrin, F. M., Schooling, T. L., Nelson, N. W., Diehl, S. F., Flynn, P. F., Staskowski, M., Torrey, T. Z., & Adamczyk, D. F. (2010). Evidence-based systematic review: Effects of different service-delivery models on communication outcomes for elementary school–age children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 41(4), 252-270.
Cook, S. W., Mitchell, Z., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2008). Gesturing makes learning last. Cognition, 106(2), 1047–1058.
Fey, M. E., Cleave, P. L., Long, S. H., & Hughes, D. L. (1993). Two approaches to the facilitation of grammar in children with language impairments: An experimental evaluation. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 36(1), 141–157.
Myhill, D. (2012). The ordeal of deliberate choice: Metalinguistic development in secondary writers. In V. W. Berninger (Ed.), Past, present, and future contributions of cognitive writing research to cognitive psychology (pp. 247–274). Psychology Press.
Scott, C. M., & Balthazar, C. H. (2013). The role of complex sentence knowledge in children with reading and writing difficulties. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 39(3), 18–30.
Strong, W. (1986). Creative Approaches to Sentence Combining. NCTE/ERIC.
